(Yicai) Jan. 24 -- Jensen Huang, the founder and chief executive officer of US chip giant Nvidia, has left Shanghai after a one-week trip in China for the Chinese New Year celebrations and headed to Japan.

Huang departed Shanghai on a private jet on Jan. 22, Nvidia confirmed to Yicai. According to flight tracker FlightRadar24, his plane was directed to Osaka, a hub for Japanese cloud providers.

While in China, Huang visited Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Taipei.

Japan was exempted from the US' new round of chip export control. At Nvidia's summit in Japan last November, Huang and SoftBank's Chairman and CEO Masayoshi Son announced a collaboration between the two companies to build an artificial intelligence infrastructure in Japan that will include the country's largest AI factory.

In addition to SoftBank, other Japanese cloud service providers are also competing to use Nvidia's chips to build AI infrastructure. Kunihiro Tanaka, the founder of Osaka-based Sakura Internet, said the company is considering purchasing around 10,000 Nvidia graphics processing units a year.

Nvidia's shares [NASDAQ: NVDA] closed 0.1 percent up at USD147.22 in New York yesterday. On Jan. 22, they jumped 4.4 percent, pushing the company's market value beyond USD3.6 trillion to surpass Apple and reclaim the title of world's most valuable firm.

On Jan. 22, the US announced a major AI infrastructure investment called Stargate, with Son attending the launch event. SoftBank is expected to contribute USD19 billion to the Stargate project.

Editor: Futura Costaglione